Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
We do not believe the underworld to be a bare hollow, nor some sewer of the world open to the sky, but a vastness sunk within a trench of the earth, and, in its very bowels, a depth hidden away — since we read that Christ, during his three days of death, was "within the earth's very core" -- meaning tucked into its innermost, interior chamber, concealed inside the ground itself, enclosed there, and positioned above still deeper pits below. And if Christ, God — because he was also man — died according to the Scriptures and was buried according to the same, then he too satisfied this law, undergoing the form of a human death, discharged among those below; nor did he ascend to the heights of the heavens before he had descended to the depths of the earth, so that there he might grant the patriarchs and prophets a share in himself. So you have both a subterranean region of the dead to believe in, and grounds enough to nudge with your elbow those who, with rather too much arrogance, think it beneath the faithful's souls to be found among the dead — servants above their Lord, disciples above their Master — scorning, it would seem, to find, in Abraham's bosom, the comfort of awaiting the resurrection. "But," they say, "it was for this that Christ went down to the dead: so that we might not have to. Otherwise, what difference is there between pagan and Christian, if the same prison holds both dead alike?" Well then — to what heaven will you go breathing out your soul, while Christ is still enthroned yonder at the Father's right, the archangel's trumpet not yet blown at God's summons, and those whom the Lord's coming will find still in the world not yet caught up to meet him in the air, along with those who died in Christ and rise first? No one has access to heaven while the earth still stands — not to say, still locked. For it is only with the passing away of the world that the kingdoms of heaven will be thrown open. Shall our sleep, then, be up in the ether with Plato's favorite boys, or out in the sky with Arius's crowd, or circling the moon among the Stoics' Endymions? No — you say — in paradise, to which even now the patriarchs and prophets, as attendants on the Lord's resurrection, have already migrated from the underworld. And how is it, then, that when the region of paradise was revealed to John in the spirit — the place set beneath the altar — it showed no other souls there but those of the martyrs? How is it that Perpetua, that bravest of martyrs, on the day of her passion, in a revelation of paradise, saw only martyrs there — unless because the sword that guards the gate of paradise yields to none but those who have died in Christ, not in Adam? A new kind of death, undergone for God, an extraordinary death undergone for Christ, is received into a separate and private lodging of its own. Recognize, then, the difference between the pagan and the believer in death — if you die for God, as the Paraclete counsels, not amid soft fevers on a sickbed, but in martyrdoms; if you take up your cross and follow the Lord, as he himself commanded. The whole key to paradise is your own blood. You have, besides, a small treatise from us on paradise, in which we establish that every soul, without exception, is held in reserve among the dead until the day of the Lord.